It started with a dream about a grey boy who called my name. Charlie. Charlie . . .
Charlie.
How do you know my name?
You told it to me in a dream.
My dream or your dream?
Yes.
I grew up powdered-milk, water-down-the-ketchup poor; on a diet of soupy mac-and-cheese and fried bologna. Fruit was a luxury. Hunger was a constant twisting in my stomach.
We lived in a squat pigeon-grey concrete low-rise with rust-pitted balconies on Toronto’s east side. The kind of dingy building favoured by crime shows and tired pulp writers. It was L-shaped. And a second such building—a mirror image—sat across it, the “L” flipped vertically and horizontally so that the two buildings formed a rectangle. A brutalist prison that reeked of urine and hopelessness.
Our tiny beige apartment was filled with splintering plywood beds and furniture. Brownish water trickled from the taps. My clothes were holey, patchwork thrift-store bargains, crusty with dirt and God-knows-what. I was skinny and friendless. I still am. The enduring ache in my head was my teeth going to slow rot. Some teeth so loose they rattled together like dice in a cup. The pain would ease into a steady throbbing thrum, and then swell to a chaotic jumble.
The apartment unit was at the end of the hallway, so that the balcony was on the side of the short L-shape, and faced across the short courtyard walkway directly at the building opposite, and at the grey boy on the rusty balcony.
I’d stepped out onto the balcony to try to escape the churring in my head, and to peer jealously at the other children rolling glassy marbles in the grassless courtyard as a merciless sun beat down on them. I gasped in the humid air like a fish out of water. People think Toronto doesn’t get hot. It’s Canada, after all. Geographically, Toronto is south of Florence. Most summers I suffocated in our cramped apartment. The heat exacerbated the constant ache in my head.
When I glanced up, across the walkway separating the buildings, there he was on the balcony opposite. The grey boy. The boy from my dream. I’d been plagued by strange dreams. In one, I’d met an odd boy in a hidden thicket and he’d whispered my name like an incantation.
Charlie.
How do you know my name?
You told it to me in a dream.
My dream or your dream?
Yes.
I’d bolted awake, shivering with night-sweats.
And now here he was, across the way.
Everything about him appeared grey—his clothes, his skin, his hair. As if he were covered in a fine dust. He was looking at me. I waved at him. Nothing. No response. He just stared that dead stare. Then his mouth opened. And for a moment the clatter in my head subsided, the world stilled, and his wavering voice reached me.
Charlie. Charlie . . .
I know what you’re thinking. Because I thought it, too. He’s dead. A ghost. I was having sunstroke and the little milk-grey boy was an apparition. A figment, whispering to me. Calling my name. Or I hadn’t yet woken and was dreaming still. I blinked, rubbed my eyes. But he was still there. Still very real. Not every story is a ghost story, after all.
Charlie.
Choo. Choo.
Charlie . . . choo . . . choo . . .
Charlie. How did he know my name? Charlie choo-choo? Was that a person? Some sort of Saturday morning cartoon character? He lifted a hand, waved it slow, lethargic. The distance between buildings wasn’t as great as you’d think. It seemed I could reach across the gap, touch him to test reality. I couldn’t, of course, but I could see a small half-smile, not-a-smile, crease the grey features of his bland face. And then that crease widened, stretched, and I saw into his dark wet mouth, glimpsed a wriggle of diseased tongue. His eyes were black and shiny like a ventriloquist’s dummy.
Charlie . . .
A wave of vertigo passed through me, and the din in my head swelled. My mouth ached. I stumbled back inside, into the sanctuary of my small, dim room and crawled into bed, trembling and tossing until pain and darkness swallowed me.
I woke the next morning stiff and sore, in my clothes from the day before, dark dreams and troubling thoughts receding into the corners of my young mind. On my bed lay two teeth, caked with dried pinkish blood. I tongued the ragged cavity in my gums. I pocketed the teeth. My stomach was a knot of anguish, and I went in search of food.
Breakfast was a half bowl of the powdery remnants of an off-brand cereal with souring milk, and a glass of watery red “juice.” Sometimes a piece of toast, and a brown banana.
Dad was shuffling noisily in his bedroom. I ate, dumped my dishes in the over-flowing sink, and fled the apartment. I didn’t think to brush my rotting teeth.
It was summer. I hated summer. School was out. Mom worked. And Dad drank.
But this isn’t a story about an alcoholic father. Not every story is about an alcoholic father.
Outside, I sat on the stoop of the building’s entrance, in a pocket of shade. It was early, but already kids were in the courtyard moving about in the swelling heat like bugs in a killing jar. Escaping their own horrors, I knew. Had they eaten? Do they hunger for more than food?
The ground-floor corner of each apartment building had a shop. The building I lived in had a barbershop, with three ancient and wizened men with crevassed faces who sat in the cracked red-leather chairs each day, smoking, and laughing garrulously at jokes told in some indeterminate European language. One of them had taken pity on me recently and given me a cut, all the time shaking his head and repeating “Poor boy. Poor boy.” They’d been there forever.
The other building had a convenience store with snacks and lotto tickets; bread and milk and dusty cans of expired soups. Dried apples and spotty bananas. Even a small hardware section with nails and rat traps and insecticides. Sometimes I’d have a couple dimes or quarters, scrounged from the folds of Dad’s recliner, or plucked from his pockets when passed out, and I’d get a small stick of meat or hunk of chocolate. A frozen lolly. A bottle of sweet, syrupy cola. All guaranteed to rot my teeth further. On this day, like most, I had nothing but the languid time of summer and a sense of aimlessness. I felt trapped in amber.
Glancing across the courtyard that day I saw him again, the grey boy. As if he was waiting for me. I think he was. Yesterday was the first time I’d seen him, and now here he was, across the yard, arms limp, still as a statue on the weed-choked ground, looking my way, his mouth agape. I shuddered, remembering that black maw, that purple-black tongue, and the soft whisper of Charlie on the summer wind. He turned and began a lazy saunter across the yard. I stood and followed at a distance.
He scuffled across the grassless courtyard to the convenience store. He paused a moment outside the shop, a hand on the door, then glanced my way before pulling it open and stepping inside. A moment later, empty-handed, he was back outside and moving toward the parking lot that bordered the back of the buildings. Beyond that cracked parking lot was a vast wooded area of pines, maples, and silver birch. I imagined that’s where he was headed. It was where I spent my summer afternoons, alone in the cool green wood. Floating silent like a silken moth through the shadows and tall trees, making up adventures in my head.
I followed the grey boy as he shuffled through the parking lot, past a group of teens playing road hockey, and stepped into those woods. As I passed into the dark forest the torment in my head quieted. A strange silence cocooned me. The heat dissipated. He was on the path, waiting for me. I walked up to him, studied him. I must admit that in the dim wood he did appear, at first glance, to be an apparition. As I looked closer, though, I could see the greyish pallor was . . . natural? He looked like some life had drained from him, is all. Like the ground beef past its date that Mom would buy. Life empties all of us, eventually. Some quicker than others. I had to be sure, though, so I reached out and pressed tentative fingertips to his chest. Through his thin T-shirt his ribs felt fragile, like a bird’s. Then a heartbeat, and I pulled my hand back. We both chuckled softly.
“You’re real,” I said, quiet, still afraid he’d dissipate and scatter to the wind like some smoke ghost. “Like me.” And in that moment I felt we could be . . . well, at least friends. If not more.
“Real,” he said in a strange murmur, and I caught a glimpse of that dark mouth. Then he turned slowly, as if it took some effort, and walked along the path deeper into the woods as I followed.
As we pushed through the trees and the strange silence—with dappled light slanting across the path, branches and brambles catching my day-old clothes, the heady scent of pine permeating the air—something loosened within me, sloughed off, and I felt light as air as we wended through the pines and moved onto unfamiliar paths, sloping slightly downward as if we were discovering some strange sunken land.
I grinned. Freedom. Adventure. The things childhood should be. Adulthood, too. Life is for living. I know that now. Lessons learned too late.
Eventually the sloping path opened onto a small clearing with a fire-pit. Thick logs, stripped of bark, circled the pit. The bones of the ancient forest, I thought.
We sat on the largest log, close. I could touch him if I wanted. And I did want to. But I didn’t touch him. Not that time. His hair was long, wiry and greasy. His eyes so black I couldn’t see a pupil. Just dark holes against the milk-white sclera. He lifted his T-shirt—movements still slow—exposing the taut grey skin of his stomach. Tucked into his waistband were packs of pepperoni sticks, a wedge of cheese. He hadn’t come out of the store empty-handed, then. He pulled the items out, lay them on his lap. My stomach grumbled. My head began its thrumming. A grin opened the boy’s face, revealing that plum-coloured tongue, and teeth as black as his depthless eyes and mouth. It was a wonder they hadn’t fallen out, crumbled to soft bits.
Despite the boy’s outward appearance—after all, who was I to judge given my own circumstances—and the pain building inside me, I was still weightless and buoyant with burgeoning possibilities of the future. I was dreaming, surely. I swore right then to never give back that small freedom. That dream. And instinctively I knew what the boy wanted when he thrust an open palm at me. We were sharing a secret history now. I pulled the two teeth from my pocket and dropped them into his hand. His fingers closed over them in a tight fist, and with his free hand he passed me some meat and cheese.
“Chew,” he said. “Chew. Chew.”
Charlie choo choo.
I gobbled it all up, licked my greasy fingers as he smiled glibly and clutched my teeth. I closed my eyes, only briefly it seemed, and when I opened them a peculiar brownish twilight was mushrooming across the sky.
The boy stood. “Time to go, Charlie.” His voice was an odd monotone, like a radio turned low, barely audible.
“How do you know my name?”
“You told me last time. Or I guessed. I forget.”
“What’s your name?” I asked. Those dark eyes squinted, face slightly scrunched. Thinking of what to tell me. Finally he said, “You can call me Echo.”
Echo, I thought. A doubling.
Somehow in the gathering gloom we found ourselves back in the courtyard, and I watched as he slipped silently into his building, his hand still balled around my teeth. I went up to my apartment. It was quiet and still like a tomb. Mom wasn’t home yet, and I felt a sense of uncertainty and displacement as if time had distorted, as if it had no meaning. The world outside was a queer brown-grey. Then my body began to vibrate as pain bloomed in my mouth, my head, my stomach; and I crawled into bed and dreamed deeply and darkly of the days to come.
You told me last time.
I woke to a note left on the kitchen table:
I’ll get milk and bread after work. Don’t wake your father.—Mom
There was one crusty heel of white bread left, which I smeared with margarine and wolfed down with tepid tap water before heading outside.
The courtyard was just beginning to fill, kids scattered to the shady pockets and corners like billiard balls. And there was Echo, right in the centre of the yard, staring at me, expectant, waiting. As I knew he would be. I stepped off the stoop and my foot skidded over something. Marbles were strewn around the ground. I picked a couple up, rolled them in my hands to shine them up. Classic cat’s eyes. Glassy and streaked with iridescent oranges and greens. I shoved them in my back pocket, and crossed the yard.
Echo turned at my approach and ambled across the courtyard to the store, and crept inside. Across the pathway three hunched figures were passing through the dark doorway of the barbershop. Then the lights were on and they were in their chairs, smoking, gesturing animatedly. The shop door behind me squealed open and Echo was outside, moving with steady purpose and more vigour than yesterday through the parking lot and into the woods as I trailed along.
We slipped through a silent world. The summer was full of new and infinite possibilities. Blood coursed through me like the current of a wild river. The steamy air was the breath of a feral beast. And there was a quieting in my head while in the forest. Thoughts of my home life buried deep.
Soon we were back at the clearing, seated on the thick logs like king’s on a throne. Echo looked at me, hint of a smile or a smirk on his face. A curious energy emanated from him. His eyes weren’t shiny-black today. They were a deep brownish amber like the cheap whisky Dad drinks, and flecked with yellow. And veiny pinkish blotches flowered along the exposed skin of his face and arms, as if he’d roughly scrubbed himself with a scouring pad. His grey skin pulling in the blood below the surface like the liner in a meat tray soaks up the raw drippings.
That queer sense of displacement settled over me. Perhaps in my immediate infatuation with Echo, I simply hadn’t really looked at him.
I gave him a faltering smile and Echo produced candy bars from his pockets. A ball of distress churned in my stomach. I swallowed dryly. Echo reached out an empty hand. It took me a beat, but then I reached into my own pocket and passed him the bright marbles. They flashed briefly—momentarily imbued with life—before he pocketed them. “Thank you, Charlie,” Echo said, and handed me a chocolate, his hand brushing mine and sending a small jolt through me. I unwrapped the bar and ate it in three quick bites. Echo laughed, eyes sparking, and handed me another. I took my time with this one. Tonguing the sugary nougat. Savouring the sweet confection. Chew, Echo said, or I thought he said.
There was another chocolate, atop the log. “You have to eat,” I said.
“Yes,” Echo said, a pinkness flushing faintly and briefly across his face. “Of course. I’m happy you’re feeding. It’s . . . satisfying.”
“Same,” I said, smiling.
“Same,” he echoed, and pushed the last chocolate at me, which I also devoured.
Belly full, I gazed at Echo. He was looking up, blinking. I turned my face upward. The sun was a blurry, burnished coin. Then something fell across the sky, like a thin gauze, and a wave of fatigue crashed through me. I closed my eyes.
I sensed movement. Echo working his hands over something. Then his voice speaking in a steady intonation, but the words were muffled. My eyes wouldn’t open. Yet I was suffused with a sanguine joy. And the day passed like that, with me cocooned in a satisfying stupor as Echo’s voice soothed my troubles and pains. And when my eyes opened he was grinning, mouth a rictus, and his teeth were whiter now, sharp even; his tongue healthy and serpentine. I must have still been in that dream-like cocoon, for next I knew it was twilight and we were outside the barbershop. Echo was pressed up against the window, hands cupped around his head, peering in. Three dark figures leered back at him.
Echo turned away and beetled across the courtyard and into his building. At first I thought he was headed into my building, but my eyes glimmered in the darkening light and I saw him enter his unit. In the dark it was easy to get them confused.
In my apartment Mom and Dad were in their bedroom, fighting, voices shrill. It’d not yet come to blows. A stitch of pain stabbed my head, and my teeth ached. Still no milk or bread. There was an open can of beans in the fridge, mostly empty, that I ate cold.
A weariness overcame me as I stumbled to the bathroom to brush my bean-stained teeth. I scrubbed and brushed but they wouldn’t come fully clean, as if permanent rot had set in. In the mirror above the sink, my eyes were dim and lifeless. A strange grey-brown Rorschach splotch stained my forehead and trailed down one side of my face. Had I fallen? No amount of soap and water could erase it. I’d try again in the morning.
I stumbled into bed, and slept fitfully, crashing from the sugar high. I dreamed of Echo. He was in the barbershop, getting his hair washed and cut, and laughing along with the three weird figures as they scurried about him, readying him for some arcane ceremony.
I woke to the hiss and screams of cicadas. The living room drapes were thrown wide, the balcony door yawning open like a fetid mouth. I stepped onto the balcony. The heat was a cudgel. My head was a cacophony of pain and noise. But there in the very centre of the courtyard was Echo, facing me, waiting. I stepped back inside, heart thudding.
The cupboard held a sleeve of stale crackers. I downed a few with some tap water. I pulled some clothes from my laundry hamper and changed in to them. The bathroom mirror was unkind—my face was ashen; teeth stained and pitted; tongue a grey slab. Eyes like river stones.
Like some unspooling unreality I was again in the courtyard, following Echo, watching him enter and exit the shop—in mere seconds it seemed—then stride through the parking lot and into the woods. There was a gleam to him as he walked the path. Almost a glow. The grey boy was a silvery beacon, exuding energy. An arrow in the darkness.
Again my head had calmed upon entering the dark wood. My gut, though—usually twisted in hunger—was a nervous pit of rising anxiety. The freedom and buoyancy I’d felt a couple days earlier was scattering like ashes in the wind.
Time held no significance, ebbing and flowing in some mercurial state. Such that the trek from courtyard to woods happened in minutes, and the trudge through the green wood seemed interminable. I plucked a thin birch branch from the ground. It resembled a bone, a skeletal arm. I dragged it behind me, tracing a ragged line on the path.
Ahead of me, Echo was chanting, Charlie choo choo Charlie choo choo Charlie choo, like an invocation. I sensed an impish grin on his countenance.
I’m here, I wanted to say. Right behind you. But I couldn’t make my mouth work. Then a reaching branch snagged my T-shirt, tearing off a swath of the threadbare white cotton, where it hung limply like a flag of surrender. I plucked the fabric from the branch and fashioned it to my stick.
Then in a blink we were in the clearing, already seated. Echo perched on his log, an eager energy vibrating through him. He was no longer the grey chimera I imagined him to be, but something else, alternately flushing brown to pink to black to grey, like a stippled river trout darting through dappled waters. He was turning into something other, I thought. Something … all?
A flicker then, like a stage curtain quickly closing, and the scene reset and there was just Echo staring at me, a frown troubling his face. I’d a vague sense I’d glimpsed something I wasn’t meant to witness.
What happened? I said. Or thought I said. I wasn’t certain the words had escaped my mouth.
Echo half-smiled, and I caught a flash of pearly-white teeth. His eyes were clear, not dark. His hair neat and short and clean. In one hand he held a plastic-wrapped sandwich, though I hadn’t seen where he could have pulled it from. That all-too-familiar ache of hunger, that appetite that couldn’t be filled, rumbled in my empty belly. Despite what I’d observed, or thought I had, hunger overrode all sense, common or otherwise. It always does. I couldn’t recall the last time I had a proper sandwich. And egg-salad by the look of it.
I reached greedily for the sandwich. Echo withdrew it, scowling, then thrust out his other hand. Everything has a price. Especially hunger. So I handed him my makeshift bone-flag, and he gave me the sandwich.
“Chew,” Echo said. Or didn’t say. Chew, Charlie.
I tore the sandwich from its clear plastic wrap and ate the first half fast. Echo plucked the balled plastic from the ground, shoved it into a pocket. I ate the rest, relishing the creamy egg and mayonnaise and unfamiliar spices.
Thank you for feeding me, Echo.
“Thank you,” he said.
My eyelids grew heavy. I forced them open. Echo was looking up again, and the world tilted. My stomach lurched, my head rocked back and forth. Then something flickered, swallowing the meagre daylight like a camera shutter slowly pinwheeling closed, leaving me in a darkness absolute.
When I opened my eyes I was alone in the courtyard at night. Overhead, stars glinted in silent solemnity. The convenience store was dark and closed, as was the barbershop (though I sensed the men inside still). Crickets cried and somewhere a dog wailed. My head pounded with a steady agonizing rhythm, and my body vibrated. I stumbled into the building, into the apartment, into my bed, into stygian dreams.
Morning, bone-tired, stomach rumbling, and I’m in the bathroom looking at a spectre in the mirror. Their face is greying, calcifying into a mask. Eyes like black pits. Dirty mop of hair. The mouth yawns slowly open revealing teeth like shards of coal, a purpling tongue. Then I hear it, like a mantra . . .
Charlie. Charlie choo choo.
And I was back in the courtyard.
I let the dream-loop unfurl. For surely that’s what this was—fanciful, heat-induced daydreams, amplified by hunger and loneliness—and I was still in bed, wrapped in a tight foetal ball like a chrysalis waiting to emerge.
But, no. Echo was waiting. He shimmered with a bright aura. And I followed him through the yard, past the store (which he didn’t enter this time), through the parking lot, and into the woods.
Echo was whistling gaily, skipping through the trees. Pain unfolded inside me. Not just in my head and teeth, but in my very bones. And a weary emptiness overcame me, as if I’d been hollowed out.
We moved among the silent pines and stately, silver birches. I picked a fallen branch from the ground, let it trail behind me, snaking a line in the path. The path sloped ever downward, and as we descended Echo’s aura strengthened, lighting the way.
Then we were back in the clearing, sitting on the wide logs, Echo a few feet from me. My head felt heavy, my mouth stitched shut. My eyes were cast downward, where I traced strange sigils in the dirt with my pointy branch. A fugue state swelled within me.
I forced my head up, looked at Echo. In front of me was a boy full of promise, full of life. He was no longer grey. But he wasn’t white or brown or black, either. He was all. He was everything. A shifting tapestry, incandescent with vitality. A vitality I had known and vowed never to relinquish just a few days ago.
I’d been lost. Adrift in my own dark depression. Then a grey boy had shown up, offering salvation. And one day we’d traipsed together through a dark, magical wood, my head stuffed with wonder and friendship, the ache of loneliness forgotten. I was bewitched, and briefly free.
Echo held it up then—the effigy. He must have been working on it here in the clearing. The body was fashioned from the birch branch, the bone-flag. The torn bit of my T-shirt was balled into a make-shift head. My two rotted teeth and the cat’s eyes marbles were affixed to the head with the discarded plastic wrap from the sandwich. There was a clump of stringy hair attached to the head that I recognized as my own, and I recalled the charitable cut I’d received. Poor boy. Poor boy.
Pain and anger flared in me. A different pain. The pain of loss. The anger of betrayal. The severing of our shared secret history. The torpor that gripped me shook loose, and a new hunger stirred.
Echo laughed, glanced up, and lifted the effigy with both hands. He was bathed in an angelic nimbus that blinded me. I closed my eyes and the dream-state of the past few days uncoiled in my mind. When I opened them again I was filled with a crystalline clarity of purpose. I blinked—once, twice, three times, and that gauzy shutter cleaved the sky, and Echo was just a sad, grey boy made even sadder as I plunged the sharpened end of my stick into his throat, then into the soft meat of each eye. It was easier than I thought it would be, and quelled the fermenting anger.
I pulled the effigy apart, scattering it across the clearing. I left Echo where he lay. The earth would claim him, as it claims all.
And a new bone-weary hunger had claimed me, my soul emptying and trickling away like a drying creek-bed. A hole had opened that needed to be filled.
In the darkening gloom I followed the line I’d scrawled in the path and made my way through the woods, then the parking lot, to the front of the barbershop. It was dark but the door opened and I stepped inside. The three of them were there, waiting for me, expressions inscrutable. They cleaned me up. Then they told me what I’d have to do to fill the hole inside me, and how to do it.
And I’ve done it ever since. Spoken to the damaged in their dreams; taken their possessions and essence to sate my hunger; guided them to sunken lands from whence they never return.
But nothing lasts forever. I grow greyer by the hour. And one day soon they will send someone for me. We are mere vessels, after all. So I leave this account. Just the one. Of me and Echo as best as I can recall. An almost-love story.
So if you find yourself on Toronto’s east side, at a squat pigeon-grey concrete low-rise housing a barbershop, inside you’ll discover three gaunt and ancient men still plying their craft.
They’ve been there forever.
Feeding.
